Check out this video of protesters live on air declaring Sky News to be the utter shite we know it is:

Eventually Sky had to cut away and just broadcast their logo for a bit. The protests were sparked after Sky presenter Kay Burley went mental at a spokesman for the protesters who were out in London and Glasgow (amongst other places) at the weekend, demanding electoral reform, which you can see below:

Kay Burley is also the journalist who brought us such clangers as claiming on September 11th 2001 “The entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been devastated by a terrorist attack,” as well as, most shamefully, asking the partner of serial killer Steve Wright, who murdered at least five women in Suffolk, “Do you think if you’d had a better sex life this wouldn’t have happened?”

What the current uproar on Sky News shows is that the Murdoch empire has bet everything on a Tory win, and sunk millions of its own money into promoting it. If they don’t get what they want, they’re likely to go absolutely crazy. How crazy? Check out Sky News political editor Adam Boulton pushing things with New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell to the brink of a fight. He jabs his finger, and sways like a pissed rageaholic, throwing his not inconsiderable weight around. Alastair Campbell is an odious piece of human garbage, who before he was engineering election wins for neoliberals had a career writing fake letters to porno mags. Who would have thought someone could go so nuts that Alastair comes off looking like the reasonable one?

Sexing it up is a good way to attract voters

Catastrofuck in the government! Today, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a huge cock up when he, after being filmed talking to an OAP about her concerns (her pension, her grandkid’s uni debt, the Eastern Europeans..) was then caught on microphone in his car calling her a “bigoted woman”.

This issue is a bit delicate. Undoubtedly what she was saying, which basically amounted to ‘Eastern Europeans come here to scrounge off benefits’, WAS bigoted. This is the basic level of racism that is on display throughout the whole of society, you come across it all the time. Does that mean it’s her fault, or that she is a nasty person? Not really. These views are supported and perpetuated by the government and the main opposition parties all the time, and it plays into the hands of far right parties like the BNP and UKIP. Just look at the way our own government treats asylum seekers in this country, and the language that has been used to discuss immigration throughout the election debates -- the system isn’t trying to challenge racist ideas, it’s trying to pander to them and perpetuate them. If someone holds a bigoted view, does that make them a bigot? Not really -- if your only reference point for what is going on in your country is the media, particularly the tabloids, then you’re having that view pumped into you day after day. I’m certain that this woman isn’t a hateful person, just misinformed.

So on one level it’s a good sign that our Prime Minister recognises that this sort of view is wrong -- you can bet your last cigarette that David Cameron would never be caught on tape making a blunder like this, because he more than likely agrees with the view of this woman. On one hand that makes him a man of principle. On the other hand, it makes him completely full of shit. He doesn’t agree (at least to an extent, as far as we’re now aware) with this sort of casual racism, he knows what the word bigoted means, yet he’s still willing to push this ‘we must be tough on immigration/benefit scroungers/whatevs’ line that we as socialists know amounts to racist horseshit. Desperate, is what I’d call him, especially after seeing his snivelling apology. How we deal with racism in society is both more nuanced and more simple than hiding in your car and calling people bigots -- we have to recognise that there are deep seated societal issues, mostly led by the fucked up control that the media has over our political experiences, which lead to people coming to hold these views. But also, for the government the solution is simple -- stop telling fucking lies to support and pander to this shite. You’d think not lying would be a pre-requisite for huge fucking governmental responsibility.

What bothers me about this whole ‘blunder’, is how everyone is so concerned about haranguing GB for not being polite to an old lady, but none of the media seem to be bothered that what this really exposes is the extent to which elections and the government in general aren’t about principles -- it’s solely about stage management. It only takes a gaffe like this to show you how fragile the whole thing really is. Let’s recap for you here: Prime Minister is ambushed by TV cameras just waiting for him to fuck up, Prime Minister says a few things that are either excruciatingly vague or he doesn’t really agree with, Prime Minister forgets to take microphone off in car, Prime Minister says what he really thinks (and undoubtedly wasn’t even smiling in the car behind the scenes, the fucker), media goes apeshit and handily happens to still be near the wronged pensioner at the time, Prime Minister grovels.

It confirms what we’ve long known: that The Thick of It actually is just a documentary.

Here we see what happened when Peter Mandelson found out about the catastrofuck:

In fact, this whole thing just reminds me of a certain factory visit undertaken by our good friend Hugh Abbott.

Just a warning, but don’t go anywhere near STV tonight. NICK CLEGG IS GOING TO BE ON IT. And Gordon Brown. And David Cameron. 
The reason:  they’re going to be ‘debating’ with each other, answering stage-managed questions from a strictly controlled studio audience (no clapping, no jeering, no facial expressions), in the first of three much hyped up ’leaders debates’.

This evening, they will begin by discussing ‘domestic issues’ – stuff like crime, health, education and welfare, followed by a competition in which try to out-right each other on immigration. All bets are off! Not to mention that half the issues being debated tonight won’t even apply to Scotland, given that much of Scotland’s domestic decision-making is now devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

Over the three televised debates though, one thing is clear: while Brown, Cameron and Clegg will skirt around the edges of the big issues, argue about national insurance increases, numbers of helicopters and who’s the biggest BFFL with Obama, they’re going to completely avoid discussing two of the biggest issues facing the country at this election: the massive public sector spending cuts that are heading our way, and the ongoing bloodshed and occupation in Afghanistan. The reason being, of course, that the Lib Dems, Labour and the Tories all have a consensus on these issues: that cuts which go ‘deeper than Thatcher’ are what’s needed, and that the ongoing war is an ‘honourable’ fight to ‘defend the safety of the British people and the security of the world in Afghanistan’ (as said by Gordon Brown in the Labour manifesto). Riiiight.

Not that you’d know it from the televised debates,  but there are thankfully other parties out there offering an alternative to the war/cuts/death promised by the mainstream parties. The SSP have been consistently raising the issue of the war in Afghanistan - a war that’s opposed by 70% of the UK population – and we’ll be continuing to try and make it a major issue at this election.

criminalise fat cats, not m cats!

Similarly, we’re the only party in this election that will dare to come out and oppose the criminalisation of mephedrone, which comes into effect tomorrow, and question drugs prohibition in general. As we’ve extensively covered on this blog, all the main parties have been quick to jump on the bandwagon to support the reactionary ban on the drug, sparked by months of tabloid lies, misinformation and pseudo-science.

Today, SSY comrades hit the streets to raise this issue, highlighting the waste of police resources and time that will now go into enforcing the ban on mephedrone – a market that has, following months of free advertising in the media, been put straight into the hands of criminal gangs. It’s madness, and if any of the party leader’s come even close to agreeing with that tonight, I will personally… rip off my own scrotum. Because that’s what people on miaow meow do apparently - I read it in The Sun so it’s gotta be true.

Last night Labour released their first party election broadcast for the general election.

It features Sean Pertwee, off of that Bo Selecta spin off, trudging along some long country roads. At the very start he looks at how far at he has to go and makes a noise that the rest of us would express as “Fuck’s sake,” before trying to find a bus stop.

The point of all this is to remind us how grim things have been since the economic collapse, and how we need to keep plodding along with Gordon. Although PM Brown doesn’t feature in the video, his heroic actions to help banks “families and businesses” are referenced constantly.

It’s not a very inspirational message, recognising that after all these years in power, there’s not really anything the Labour Party can promise us, apart from of course cuts “deeper than Thatcher’s” and kicking people off the internet in order to protect the profits of record corporations.

So instead of ‘Things Can Only Get Better,’ we get “Now is not the time to change course.” In other words, grin and bear it.

Of course, it’s not quite as scary as Sean Pertwee’s last Party Political Broadcast, seen below. Watching this effort, it makes us wonder how far Labour’s repression of our desire for a better society will go:

Although, to be fair, it’s unlikely that Labour will ever bring us something as exciting as Gun Kata.

The broadcast ends with a little voiceover from none other than recently retired Timelord David Tennant, although he’s not doing the English accent he had to put on to be Dr Who. He promises us that we can make Britain “the country we all want it to be”, which of course begs the question of how government spending cuts will affect the Torchwood Institute.

But we do advise Labour to be careful about accepting Tennant’s support. He’s proven to be fickle in his political alliances in the past, and his support could prove to be a poisoned chalice:

Sean Pertwee is of course the son of Jon Pertwee, himself a former Timelord. If only the Third Doctor was still around he could perhaps have given some much needed advice on how to spice up the film. Here’s how the Labour election broadcast should have looked. If they had put this out as what Labour had planned for the next few years, they may well have persuaded me to stay the course:

But as it is, all they are in fact offering us is “stick with boring Gordon cos he’s not quite as bad as the Tories.” Hardly “I have a dream!” is it? In fact, we think that this video pretty much accurately sums up the promises for 4 more years of boredom and neoliberalism given in Labour’s broadcast.

Bonus: To see how an election broadcast should be done, check out this.

I really, really hope the cameraman did this on purpose.

The Sun newspaper pledged its support to David Cameron and the Conservative party in Autumn 2009, and have since been dedicated to promoting Conservative ideas, and revealing shocking anti-Tory bias.

A few days ago, they published an article unearthing “alarming smears against Tories by state-owned BBC” including appalling behaviour by Basil Brush.

What mischief has that lovable fox been up to now?

THE Basil Brush Show featured a school election with a cheat called Dave wearing a blue rosette.

The BBC’s Head of Corporate Affairs Tina Stowell worked for William Hague; former senior political correspondent Guito Hari has become Boris Johnson’s Director of Communications; Political Editor Nick Robinson was national chairman of the Young Conservatives; and the BBC’s Westminster editor Steve Mawhinney is son of a former Conservative cabinet minister.

I’m sure many Leftfield readers will have been watching the latest series of Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, pretty much the best satire on telly.

I loved the second series of this vital show, taking down the lies and fantasies of the media at every turn. But I didn’t love most of the bits featuring “US comic and drunk [big woop] Doug Stanhope.”

This guy has a persona of an absolute misanthrope: he hates the world and everyone in it. His most objectionable bit was the one embedded above, talking about overpopulation.

In this little rant, Stanhope tries to make out like he’s telling the world a hidden truth, something hidden by the media because it doesn’t fit with the mainstream environmentalist agenda. This supposed truth is that there are too many people in the world, using up too many resources, and the only way we can really save the environment is to stop having kids.

But the reality is that this idea is a very powerful one, and it’s been used by the ruling class as an excuse for nearly 200 years now.

In 1798 English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population. He argued that population growth would always outstrip the expansion of the food supply, and that as more workers became available wages would be driven down, leading to poverty.

2.Many.Malthuses.

In other words, the working class in Britain were to blame for their own poverty. It had nothing to do with the exploitation they suffered at the hands of the capitalists, who owned the places where they worked, and got rich on the back of their labour.

The thing is, he was wrong. Food production has grown faster in the last 200 years than at any other time in history, and has rapidly outstripped population growth. Famines aren’t caused by food shortages, but by unequal distribution of food.

But blaming the poor for poverty and hunger was a convenient solution for the people who were really responsible-the rich.

In the 1960s Malthus’ arguments were revived by environmentalists, who argued that population growth in the third world was causing an ecological crisis and must be stopped.

These people never however stopped to think about the centuries of looting that the third world has suffered at the hands of European empires. Nor did they consider that many people in poor countries have many children to ensure that some of them survive the harsh realities of an impoverished childhood.

In fact, the rate of world population growth is slowing. It peaked in the 1960s, and ever since the rate of increase has been getting slower.

The population theorists thought that if the world’s resources were a pie, reducing the number of people who wanted a slice would mean everyone gets more. But what about the 1 or 2 people that are eating three-quarters of the pie, leaving the rest of us fighting over the crumbs?

Delicious pie: Time to fight for a bigger slice

Most mainstream environmentalists don’t want to confront the realities of inequality, caused by capitalism. It’s much easier to tell everyone that they have to play their part, change their lightbulbs etc., than to say “A tiny minority of the world’s population are fucking everything up to make themselves rich.” The reason it’s easier is that rich people are very powerful, and taking them on is a hard fight. But if we’re really going to prevent the worst of climate change, and save the global environment, then we’ll have to take them on and beat them.

As a system, capitalism is based on economic growth. Every year we must produce more products, consume more, and make more money. But growth is unequal-the economy is constantly funneling more and more wealth from the hands of the majority into the those of the rich.

Right now, 10% of the world’s population own 54% of the world’s wealth. The richest 50 humans on Earth make more money than the poorest 416 million put together. In their unceasing quest to get richer, these people are trashing the Earth, by pulling out everything of value from the ground, the sea, and the soil, and by pumping back the toxic waste left over. These are the people who are really responsible for climate change, and must be defeated.

The best way to reduce population growth is to start ending the poverty afflicting most of the world’s population. For decades the world’s rich countries and financial institutions have forced poorer countries to cut their public spending, preventing them from having decent health services. If more poor countries were able to follow the example of Cuba, and set up world beating health services, then less babies would die and parents would have less children. Another key issue is women’s access to proper sex education, and reproductive rights to control their own bodies.

If we’re really going to save human civilisation from the potential catastrophes on the horizon, we can’t be human-haters. We need to change our society to be more eco-friendly, and at the same time more people-friendly. It’s more than possible to meet all the basic needs (clean water, housing, enough to eat, a fulfilling life) for all the people in the world.

The people in the way of us achieving this would much rather believe that all humans are equally responsible. I’m sorry to disappoint them, but with unequal wealth and power comes unequal responsibility. So Doug Stanhope isn’t bringing us a radical message that they don’t want you to hear. His hatred of humanity (which conceals a real misogyny-see his comments about “a tired old whore” and women’s wombs) actually suits the mainstream agenda just fine. Because it lets the people who’s fault it really is off the hook.

This map uses colour and distortion to show two different things. The extent to which a country is squeezed or inflated shows the extent to which countries are consuming their fair share, based on population, of the world’s resources. Starved-looking countries consume less than their fair share (most of Africa), whereas stuffed-looking countries consume far more than their share (most of Europe and North America). The colour of the countries shows the balance between whether a country has, within its borders, can generate enough resources and cope with its own waste within its environment (green, like environmentally rich Brazil and Canada) or not (like the Middle East and, yes, the United States). (via www.pthbb.org)

From bean to cup, you fuck up

The first proper oh-my-days-I-can’t-believe-the-BBC-have-finally-come-to-their-senses-and-given-it-a-proper-run series of The Thick Of It is nearly at its end. Gone, of course, is Chris Langham’s bumbling Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship Minister, and in is the unknown and unrespected Nicola Murray, played with a degree of empathy not usually associated with the employees of DoSAC by her out of Nighty Night (‘Hiya Cath!’). You get the sense that she is a regular person, your typical Labour backbench MP with naïve ideas about how she can use her new position to improve social mobility. Or was. Suddenly under the intense glare of the rabid media, she finds herself surrounded by aides she can’t trust, desperately trying to claw on to some sense of privacy around her crumbling family situation and unable to do right for wrong with potty-mouthed spin doctor extraordinaire Malcolm Tucker breathing down her neck.

‘The Gorbals Goebbels’ is back, just as sweary as ever, but this time there’s a palpable change in the air – with the government in a right pickle, he’s cracking up, and he’s not going down without a fight. In last Saturday’s episode we saw him reveal a tiny shaving of human emotion as he revealed to Terri – the highly ridiculed and slightly annoying Civil Servant who, knowing that she would be the only person there not experiencing internal turmoil at the idea of losing her job in a brutal and embarrassing administration change, and isn’t especially bothered about playing nicey-nice – “I used to be the fucking Pharaoh, but now I am fucking floundering in a fucking Nile of shit. But I am gonna fashion a paddle out of that shit”. And when you hear him say something like that, you know exactly where this show is coming from.

Labour Ministers themselves admit that it is a cartoon version of the truth, but this series seems to have gone one further – it has a firm grip on the desperation of the outgoing Labour government, and you get the sense it is no longer such a cartoon. Tucker began as the all-knowing, all-connected Alastair Campbell of the Blair years, and now he is every Labour official still standing rolled into one hair-tearing, wide-eyed, foamy-mouthed lunatic finding himself out of the loop and out of control, claws dug into the side of a sinking ship, refusing to let himself believe that he just doesn’t have the power to save it. You don’t get the impression Malcolm is a selfish man. He doesn’t want the power for himself, although he relishes any and every chance to talk down the people that are standing in his way. What he wants is, by any means necessary, to keep his party in government. He probably doesn’t even know or believe in what they stand for any more, but he isn’t going to let that get in the way of doing his job. Poor Malcolm.

Things can only get shitter

This series has expanded upon the DoSAC team’s Opposition counterparts introduced in the excellent hour-long specials, made before the success of the movie adaptation In The Loop. Old Tory Peter Mannion, one of those types that believes in maintaining the integrity of one’s private life by doing what you want (but not dobbing each other into the papers for it), is the Shadow Minister poised to take over Nicola’s job at the next General Election. But as New Tory spinmeister Stewart Pearson revealed to Malcolm in the hilarious sleaze-off in the corridors of Radio 5 Live in last week’s episode, he’s not above putting old cows like Mannion out to the slaughter for the sake of the new party image.

Much like how Blair stomped on the Old Labour posse to reach the dizzy heights of Things Can Only Get Better 1997, Stewart brilliantly personifies the insidious, smarmy, cut-throat world of Cameron’s New Tories, even shitting on their own ‘old guard’ as they clamber over piles of bodies in the race to be first at the Westminster elections. Is this what the country wants for itself? ‘Knowledge is porridge?’ It’s meaningless, just like Cameron’s face – in the papers, detached from his roots and his party’s racist, anti-worker, anti-youth, anti-everything that’s not a briefcase stuffed full of money belonging to a CEO policies. His face everywhere, on billboards 20 feet high, telling you ‘I’ve got a plan, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Pah, and you thought you hated Thatcher!’ Imagine that when you’re trying to sleep at night. 20 years from now, we’ll lament the simple buffoonery and rib-tickling money-stealing of the Brown era, probably write it off as at least slightly better than life under a Tory government, as we cry into our milk-less cornflakes. Well, as we know, politics goes round and round in circles, making small gains and large setbacks and then doing it all over again it can never be perfect but the worst thing is that it never even tries to come close to being the right side of wrong. Imagine there was something we could do to fight back, to try and break the cycle, like, I don’t know, work together with honesty, integrity and a fucking-sense-of-humour for socialism and equality. It would be pretty neat if there were people out there trying to work towards that, wouldn’t it?

As this series draws to a close, Malcolm’s sanity teetering on a knife edge, we’ll have to wait to find out the answers to a few questions. How far will Labour fall from grace? Just how bad will the Tory government be for ordinary people? How much worse will it be for the disadvantaged many? What will Armando Iannucci transform The Thick Of It into with a new set of heavily scrutinised Ministers to take the piss out of? And where the hell is Jamie McDonald?

Well, until these answers reveal themselves, fuckety-bye for now.

Special Guest Post Exclusive by Honorary SSY Member Jo Harvie….

So it’s the morning after Griffin got on Question Time. The Guardian and Independent have slammed the oxygen feed to the fascists, the Star has called him a nuttaaaah, and every single telly programme and radio phone-in, from GMTV to This Morning has discussed the merit of allowing ‘Dick’ to sweat, giggle and stutter through an hour of flagship political discussion.

There’s been a mixed bag of views shared. A few surprising celebrities have argued passionately that there should never have been a place for the BNP on a programme like Question Time. Everyone on Twitter loved Bonnie Greer’s intellectual wasting of Griffin’s idiotic view of history. All the panellists agree he looked stupid.

But from the people phoning in, there’s an overwhelming feeling that it was a sin for him, the poor kid who hadn’t done his homework being hounded by a whole gaggle of strict teachers. One phoner-upper to The Wright Stuff actually likened Griffin to “Joan of Arc tied to the stake”. Well, I suppose he insists he can trace his ancestors back to William the Conqueror, making him, by his own standards, French.

NIck Griffin is no victim. From the second it was announced that the BBC had invited him onto Question Time he couldn’t lose. He looked inarticulate. He looked nervous. The bloke who made the South Pole joke made him look a total tube. But he was there. He was on our tellies, sitting opposite the ‘political elite’ he purports to despise so much. He touched Bonnie Greer’s arm several times. I hope she’s burnt her jacket.

And again, and again, last night and across all channels this morning, it’s been repeated that none of the politicians could answer the question about ‘the problem of immigration’. Labour, LibDem and Tory argued it out last night about who it was who’d let too many people in, and who would let in less in the future.

The argument I’m hearing today is that the mainstream parties are ’scared’ to debate immigration. That’s nonsense, they talk about immigration all the time. It’s just that they’re all saying the same thing – ‘we have to find ways to stop people getting in’. Between them, they have shifted the language on immigration so far to the right that they’re all living next door to the BNP.

Let’s hear the other side for a change. Britain is not ‘full up’. If the UK’s population is rising slightly (Scotland’s, on the whole, is not) it’s because middle class people are living longer.

The number of people making a new application for asylum in the UK rose, very slightly, this year, after dropping over the last five years. Not because people are looking to live comfortably on our benefits – our government forces people to live in absolute poverty, on £35 a week, while they wait for a decision on their asylum claim – but because Western armies have clattered through their countries spreading terror and chaos. People seeking asylum come, overwhelmingly, from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Tory Baroness Warsi challenged Griffin’s use of the term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ – I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the term challenged on TV – because it’s an invented slur. There are no bogus asylum seekers, every human on the planet has the right to ask for sanctuary. Yet her party would still seek to limit the number of people to whom we offer that sanctuary, would send families back to the killing fields of Sudan and Somalia, to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

They argued over the number of people who arrived from Eastern Europe. So what? People came, they worked, they paid taxes. And when rich white people screwed the whole world’s economy, lots of people went home to try to work and pay taxes there. Like the British young people who troop off to work their way round Australia, then come home when they’ve had enough adventure.

Britain’s unemployment rate is soaring – not because of Poles or Romanians or Somalians, or even Australians, who are in fact the most regular visa overstayers in the UK – but because of an economic system that bleeds every profit it can from working people of every race, then dumps them when it’s expedient.

Griffin is bleating today about his beating last night. And as very, very funny as it was – ‘he’s not in the violent Ku Klux Klan’, ‘I’m frightened of men kissing’ – until we get voices on Question Time who don’t just pay lip service to the bounties of immigration, ‘yay for curry and Dizzee Rascal!’, but who say clearly that all political parties must stop pushing fear of the other, and really tackle poverty, unemployment and exploitation of all people, then the fascists keep winning.

The Venezuelan government has attempted to ban Family Guy because they think it promotes Marijuana use. Cable TV stations which don’t stop airing the show will be given hefty fines.

Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said the programme should be pulled from the airwaves after being outraged by a recent episode in which the show’s characters started a campaign to legalise the drug. You can see the episode in question here.

Venezuela’s radical government has a lot of support amongst socialists, but there’s a lot of controversy about TV.  Cable television stations are used as a front to undermine the government and their radical policies, leading to attempts to ban the cable TV companies altogether and set up state-owned TV. It’s a question of priorities – should people or companies with offensive views still have a right to freedom of speech?

(In November last year, a revolutionary Venezuelan band called La Redonda visited Scotland and were keen to meet other young socialists – several SSY members met up with the band to discuss various issues, and the whole meeting was filmed on shown on Avila TV, Venezuela’s radical stated owned TV station.)

Anyway, I’m sure you all know that Leftfield is definitely in favour of freeing the weed and supports Family Guy in the struggle.

If Family Guy should be banned for anything, it should be for its treatment of domestic violence and rape – they make so many ‘jokes’ about violence against women that they’re practically promoting it.